A court has handed down the death sentence to 38 people for a string of blasts in western India in 2008. The judge sentenced 11 others to life in prison for the bombings which killed 56 people and left 200 injured in the city of Ahmadabad.
On 8 February, Special Court Judge A.R. Patel convicted all 49 men facing trial and on Friday he pronounced capital punishment for 38 of the accused.
Supreme Court lawyer Vishwendra Verma said it was the first time so many people have been sentenced to hang in one case.
“This is indeed unprecedented,” Verma told RFI in Delhi.
“But if a crime has been committed then perpetrators must be punished,” Verma said, adding that the condemned prisoners have the right to challenge the sentence in the state high court and then in India’s Supreme Court.
A special court in Gujarat pronounced the death sentence to 38 out of 49 convicts in the 2008 Ahmedabad serial bomb blast case. Eleven others have been sentenced to life imprisonment by the court, the special public prosecutor Amit Patel said pic.twitter.com/3zpjSFeQBY
— ANI (@ANI) February 18, 2022
Twenty-eight others were let off for lack of evidence in the course of the trial in Ahmadabad, Gujarat state, which has a history of religious strife including riots in 2002 which claimed the lives of some 1,000 people, most of them Muslims.
Explosives packed in lunch boxes and bicycles, went off in two waves on 26 July, 2008. Some were placed at hospitals and primed to target first responders bringing casualties of the initial blasts.
The attack was claimed by an Islamic militant group called Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami but some experts believe it was the handiwork of the much larger Indian Mujahedeen group.
Judge Patel during the online hearing charged the accused men with murder, illegal possession of arms and conspiracy to wage war against the state as he also ordered compensation for those killed or maimed.
‘Rarest of rare’
Human rights activists such as Colin Gonsalves argued the death row prisoners had already served 14 years in prison. He also argued the national trend was to hand down the death penalty only in the “rarest of rare” cases.
“The Supreme Court is commuting case after case. The high courts are commuting in many, many cases so why is the trial court bucking the trend so to speak and so I don’t think it will sustain at a higher level of judicial scrutiny,” Gonsalves told RFI.
‘When it is 14 years after the case then that itself is a very good ground for commutation to life imprisonment,” said Gonsalves, a lawyer by profession.
India has carried out 720 executions since its 1947 independence. Nearly 355 of them were carried out in Uttar Pradesh, the country’s most populous state, according to the National Law University.
Some experts believe the actual number could be higher.
Capital Delhi account for 24 executions, including four men hanged in 2020 for the gang rape of a 23-year-old city student in 2012, a crime which shook the nation’s conscience and sparked protests after the young woman's death in a Singapore hospital.
State prosecutor Amit Patel said he had an open-shut case against the men facing the hangman’s noose.
“There were many witnesses regarding the conspiracy and that is why we examined 1,163 witnesses before the court,” Patel told reporters and added the prosecution had clinching evidence.
Modi a target?
India’s ruling Hindu nationalist BJP party claimed the bombings were part of grand plan to eliminate the political leadership of Gujarat.
“One thing sure is that there was a definite plot to target then chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi,” said BJP spokesman Shehzad Poonawala.
Modi was Gujarat’s chief minister at the time of the blasts.
Some in India have welcomed the sentences.
“This was an offense against the state. This is not an offense against an individual,” Yatin Oza, a lawyer, explained.
“This is a threat to national security and the integrity of India and anybody who speaks against the verdict, I don’t think speaks in the interest of the nation,” he added.
